HP Pavilion dv2899ea black screen

My daughter's HP Pavilion Artist's Edition laptop is continually defaulting to a black screen after booting up.
We updated the nvidia driver, but to no avail. She's running Vista Home Premium.

Any ideas how we can cure this? Safe mode doen't seem to help, I also started it without battery in. HP don't really want to know now it's out of warranty, but I see on their site there has been a recall of some similar models for a video card fault.